The Prologue
Before the first weekly digest, there were 1,348 commits. This is where the machine came from.
since 7 December 2025
Every week, this digest follows flightofthefox — building Hyperscale in the open: a sharded, Rust-native rewrite of Radix designed to get faster as validators join, instead of grinding to a halt. But the story doesn’t begin at Week #1. It begins on 7 December 2025, with a single commit whose message read, simply, “Fresh repo.”
In the five months that followed, flightofthefox wrote 1,348 commits — very nearly alone — and by the time the funded work on Milestone 1 formally began in May, the hard core of a sharded blockchain was already standing: a working consensus engine, transactions executing across shards, a deterministic crash simulator, and mathematical proofs of the parts that are never allowed to break.
Consider this the “previously, on Hyperscale” — the ground every weekly digest is built on, told in the language of hyperscale.rs. From here, Week #1 picks up the thread.
The registry of who’s validating, how much they’ve staked, and which shard they sit on. It was among the first things to exist — you can’t split the work until you know who’s doing it.
The guarantee that the chain can never split into two conflicting histories. View-change certificates and cross-shard verification landed early, because safety is the one thing you can’t bolt on later.
Making a transaction that touches two shards either fully happen or not at all — deliberately not the textbook approach. Cross-shard execution was wired into the runners in the very first weeks.
A deterministic sandbox where any failure can be replayed exactly. Built so that when something breaks, flightofthefox can reproduce it on demand instead of guessing.
Where tests aren’t enough, maths is. Quint specifications model the protocol’s safety and liveness, so the core guarantees are proven — not merely observed to hold.
All of global state held as a single binary merkle tree — the quiet trick that makes cleanly re-sharding the network possible at all.
That’s the ground floor. Everything the weekly digest covers from here on — adaptive sharding, shards splitting and merging, validators reshuffling without dropping a transaction — is built on top of these foundations. Read on: Week #1 begins 11 May 2026.
Start reading → Week #1 · 11–17 May 2026Questions? flightofthefox is always happy to discuss in the community Telegram.